‘Salome’ Conductor Thrives on Challenge

“I need a clone, at the very least,” Randall Behr says ruefully.

The 37-year-old conductor is the resident associate conductor for Los Angeles Music Center Opera, music director for Long Beach Opera and music director of USC Opera--all three of which have productions running or in preparation.

“It’s a little strange this morning, throttling down,” Behr says from the Long Beach Opera offices, where he is deep in preliminary “Marriage of Figaro” rehearsals for that company’s Beaumarchais trilogy, after conducting the opening night of Music Center Opera’s “Salome” revival in what amounts to his major company/major production debut.

Not only is Behr new to the MCO production, this is his first “Salome,” period. Would he rather have tried this in less visible circumstances?

“I think one would always prefer that. On the other hand, it has to be somewhere and one has to grasp the opportunity.”

Behr’s preparation for “Salome” was about two years of close study of the score. He was tapped for the MCO revival after general director Peter Hemmings observed Behr leading “Ariadne on Naxos” in Long Beach in March, 1987.

“It’s a mammoth thing. It feels like a giant piece rammed in a trash compactor,” Behr says of “Salome.”

“There has to be a great deal of imaginative deconstruction and reconstruction.”

Though local audiences may now know him best for “Ariadne” and “Salome,” Behr does not consider himself a Strauss specialist--or any other kind of specialist.

“I don’t feel like a specialist. One of the problems with American conductors is that we don’t get a chance to repeat works. In European houses, a piece may be done many times over years, and really enters your blood.”

The MCO “Salome” was widely hailed when first presented in 1986. The current run at the Music Center, with further performances Sunday, Thursday and May 1, reunites the original cast. Additionally, Maria Ewing has sung the title in this production as presented in London and Chicago.

Behr, however, is little daunted by coming into an established production.

“On one level, it’s actually very helpful to have them (his singers) know exactly what they want. I have no problem with that--I love working with people who have strong ideas. I would have liked to have had more time to explore with the singers, but I certainly had enough orchestra time, nine rehearsals, and that’s rare. It’s not unusual for Music Center Opera, but it is for other companies.”

A graduate of the University of the Pacific, Behr began an extended association with the San Francisco Opera and its Merola Program and Western Opera Theatre in 1975. From there to the Music Center pit has been a long, sometimes bumpy, road, leading to engagements around the country and in Canada and Italy.

“Those things are always tricky. This is the biggest piece I have done up to now with a big company,” Behr says of his career.

What interests Behr most about opera “is the ability of the great composer to portray psychological developments. In purely musical terms, Strauss is able to show the turning of desire into hatred and vengeance,” which Behr proceeds to illustrate for his listener by singing examples of motivic permutations from “Salome.”

“I like very much the danger of the theater,” he adds, “the multiplicity of approaches that one must meld together.”

In Long Beach, Behr has also conducted “The Ballad of Baby Doe” and a benefit concert with Marilyn Horne. The “Figaro” that he is preparing is the central component of a trilogy opening next month. It begins with Paisiello’s setting of “The Barber of Seville” and concludes with the play “The Guilty Mother,” with new incidental music by Mark McGurty.

“We’re going to allow the designers to try to connect it (the trilogy) visually,” Behr says, “but I think, basically, each of these pieces will work on their own terms, and that the cumulative effect will be an audience one.”

As these productions are rehearsing simultaneously, Behr is only responsible for “Figaro.”

“There really is a limit to me,” he says, laughing, and that is the reason he is not conducting the program of one-act operas based on Cocteau librettos, running at USC this weekend (Murry Sidlin is guest conductor there).

With his multiple responsibilities here, Behr says, “I’m pretty much locked in for the next three years. As wonderful as it is to travel, it’s nice to have a home base.”

For the future, he hopes to get into symphonic conducting. Working in the pit, he says, “seems to be a young man’s profession. It’s exhausting--it’s also wonderful.”